Friday, January 19

Thelma

Premiere Engagement!

Co-presented by Wicked Queer: The Boston LGBT Film Festival

Friday, January 19 – Thursday, January 25

(2017) dir Joachim Trier w/Eili Harboe, Kaya Wilkins, Henrik Rafaelsen, Ellen Dorrit Petersen [116 min; DCP]
Aptly described by IndieWire as Carrie directed by Ingmar Bergman, acclaimed writer/director Joachim Trier (Oslo, August 31st) and his co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt bring us this stunning vision of a young woman with incredible powers. At first, Thelma seems like a normal university freshman coming from a sheltered upbringing into the big city – her parents call her too often, she has trouble making friends, and she’s questioning everything about her upbringing – but when she begins to have seizures that seem tied to extraordinary events, things get weird. And when she tries to fight the feelings that she’s developing for fellow student Anja (Wilkins), her repressed emotions – and her psychokinetic powers – come rushing to the foreground.

“Trier torques the narrative tension masterfully, offering glimpses of the natural world (a snake slithering through grass, fish frozen in a winter pond) that are as unsettling as his flashes of action are electric. Thelma doesn’t play with pig’s blood and jump scares; its dreamlike dread is subtler and stranger, and much harder to shake. A–“ – Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly

“An expertly effective genre exercise that only occasionally feels like an exercise. A lot of the time it feels like an exorcism.” – Sean M. Burns, The ARTery

“Thelma’s story sticks to your bones like a shiver, and sinks deeper for days after the credits have rolled.” – David Ehrlich, Indiewire

“As a hushed, haunting portrait of a young woman reconciling daughterly duty and her own incipient power, “Thelma” feels like a stylish, timely allegory for the present moment.” – Ann Hornaday, Washington Post